2 July 2010
Edition29 ★ edition29.com

I’ve only learned about them recently from their excellent iPad Apps, but boy, they deliver.

Digital Magazines are tricky, it’s different with print, for one it takes more resources from the human side and less hurting to mother nature. For some, it’s still conceptual, and despite the loud cheering from the spectators, only a small number of people are doing it right for now, so I ended up not buying the magazines I thought I would buy.

Edition29, however is different. They seem to have leapfrogged from print publication and jump across the field to the digital side, their apps are a unique blend of paper-like design layout and digital’s interactivity. When their issue, Edition29 ARCHITECTURE 001 came out, it was an instant buy for I love design and Architecture. And look what they have on their they came up after that, it has my name written all over it.

If there’s a future in digital publication, it would be something cost efficient, sparklingly brilliant and alive. What Edition29 is doing now is just a beginning.

Friday, 2 July 2010

iPhone 4 as a camera

An extensive test and report on iPhone 4’s usability as a camera published over at AnandTech. It looks reason enough for one not to carry a separate camera device, especially an HD video camera, but still the iPhone 4 — like all iPhones — lacks a physical tribute to distinguish itself as a capturing device that makes it camera-like, camera on/off and a hardware shutter button.

In my experience, non iPhone users always mistakenly press the home button thinking it as the capture trigger, and I have always have to launch the camera app beforehand. In pre iOS 4 software, we can program a double home-button press to launch the camera, iOS 4 multi-tasking capability takes it all away leaving us with nothing but the home screen’s app icon.

A separate physical button would be nice, but impractical, I wouldn’t want Apple to turn the iPhones into those Cybershots camera, the iPhone is always a phone first, everything else later, and let us not change that. But a smart set of programmable button, like perhaps the *cough*, volume up button as capture trigger (we won’t need turn up/down the volume in camera mode), or *cough* home button triple press, ringer switch quick toggle, all can be used to improve the iPhone as a point-and-shoot replacement camera.

I have used jailbroken iPhone in the past and someone made a hack just for that, and I can tell you firsthand that it works just fine, people, the only downside is not only we have to explain it to non-iPhone users, but also to iPhone owners due to its non-standard behavior.

Alas, the iPhone is still a phone, the nice camera is just a bonus that happens be quite handy.

So let the floodgate opens.

It’s The Lenses, Stupid! ★ luminous-landscape.com

If you don’t have time to read the entire 5600 words, skip over to the part about the lens:

Leica lenses are almost always about as good as human beings are able to design and make … These are the first medium format lenses from Leica and the first autofocus lenses from that company. They are the beginning of a new generation of optics, and Leica knows that they have to be exceptional.

If you can’t visually imagine how good the lenses are, there’s one image to illustrate it. Never in my career I have seen an iris so beautifully rendered, one’s shadow so clearly visible in our retina on a single photograph.

Tuesday, 29 June 2010

ImageRights comes to save the day. Really?

From their website:

ImageRights uses its industrial strength crawler technology to continuously scan business sites, blogs, news and media sites and … indexes millions of new images that the crawler finds every month. We then use powerful image recognition technology to compare the images from these sites to your images in order to detect where they are being used.

Plagiarism is a plaque that has become a major part the internet; I for one has been a victim of such practice by some big names in the local electronic media market, unlike ImageRights, I discovered the heavily modified photograph by accident, unlike ImageRights, I identified the used artwork by bare eyes, unlike ImageRights, it didn’t yield any financial settlement nor legal action. Unlike ImageRights, business continue as usual and it took a simple (cheap and friendly) precaution from my end: watermarking. (the purported image was a personal work and doesn’t belong to any of my clients).

ImageRights enlisted 5 personas as their executive team, but not a single word is mentioned about the technology being used to empower the “Industrial strength crawler technology”, and despite the upfront registration fee and monthly cost, the website also fails to mention the split-scheme or scenario or relevant facts like what sort of requirements from the customer’s end to proof the ownership of the “surrendered” photographs.

What’s even more interesting is the industry partners ImageRights is said to be proud of, none of it (at this time of this writing) is where the real shooters hang out, not a photo agency, neither a big name publishing operation, nor a single photo hosting/stock agency who everyone uses, like Flickr, Corbis, iStockPhoto, etc. to name a few.

Now the real question is, would you be willing to surrender your images provided the above facts? Would you be willing to pay some artificial Batmans to cop your images at night and catch any cheap shots for using your image unauthorized?

I’ll take my chances and stick with my watermarks. Even if someone comes to steal my image, so be it, you’re welcome!